Diagnosing Donald Trump

On January 31, 2017, the Psychology Today editorial staff published a well-balanced summary of the debate over whether to declare President Trump mentally ill. While the debate focuses on mental health professionals such as psychiatrists and psychologists who are credentialed to make such diagnoses, the question clearly goes further. Public commentary following this and other […]

Christmas 2016, a fable

No one recalled when Rudy joined the teamsters, it may have been several seasons back. Awkward and quiet, he mostly kept to himself. The other guys avoided Rudy. No one ever asked him to join their casual poker games, no one ever invited him to hang out after work. He wasn’t harassed exactly, but their […]

“Brain disease”: the anti-psychiatrists respond

I don’t avoid reading opinions strongly critical of psychiatry. They help sharpen my reasoning skills. It’s always possible they might alter my views in some way. And like most everyone, I consider myself openminded and receptive to criticism. However, after years of reading Thomas Szasz, Robert Whitaker, and the screeds of the less articulate, after […]

Physician mistrust and the end of the doctor-patient relationship

KevinMD.com published a post a couple of days ago from medical student Joyce Ho in which she admitted to discomfort raising the topic of religion with patients. As a “polarizing” issue that could make the doctor-patient relationship “more unprofessional,” Ms. Ho imagined that patients would fear playing into their doctors’ prejudices, particularly if the doctor […]

Narcissists, psychopaths, and other bad guys

A patient of mine recently observed that the increasing use of the the term “psychopath” in popular media is really a disguised way of criticizing selfishness. Dressing up selfishness as an odd and frightening clinical disorder — slapping a diagnostic label on it — makes for catchy news copy, and grants pundits emotional distance between […]

Therapy for therapists

Tara Parker-Pope of the New York Times blog Well featured my prior post, on the feelings some patients have as they imagine whether their psychotherapists have been in therapy themselves. My post was about patients’ fantasies, not the reality of therapy for therapists. Nonetheless, many of the comments argued for the great value of such […]

“Have you seen a therapist yourself?”

Recently a patient asked whether I’d ever been in therapy myself. Without answering his question directly (see my post on psychotherapist disclosure and privacy), I replied that many of us have, and asked what it meant to him. It would be a bad sign: “How can you help if you need help too?” We went […]